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Monday, 24 March 2014

Cunning Foxes and Wily Coyotes

Lately I’ve been enjoying a film and a book, very
different in character yet united by a common theme. The film is the animated
comedy ‘Fantastic Mr Fox’, directed by Wes Anderson and based on the story by
Road Dahl. The book is called ‘Prodigal Summer’ by Barbara Kingsolver, and
although it’s a novel it cleverly integrates a lot of science, in a way that it
always remains a part of the story rather than as an ‘expository lump’. I’m not
a scientist, but Kingsolver is, and in this book one of her main characters is
concerned with the role of predators in ecosystems. She studies coyotes.

This character, the aptly named Deanna Wolfe, tries
passionately to explain to her lover, a farmer who hunts coyotes, why predators
are more important to an environment than prey animals. In an ecosystem, there
are relatively few ‘top predators’, such as bears and wolves, but lots of prey
animals, from deer to mice and squirrels. Shooting most or all of the local top
predators can have devastating effects beyond the loss of a single noble
species, because the prey animals then multiply. Squashing spiders causes flies
to increase; killing foxes can cause a plague of rabbits that eat the farmer’s
carrots. The increase of the top predator’s natural prey can also crowd out
other species, causing their extinction. Often we cannot predict the effects of
wiping out a predator population, but it will nearly always cause problems for
a previously stable ecosystem.

Deanna has written a thesis which attempts to explain why
the wily coyote, despite being the ‘most despised animal’ in the United States,
killed in hundreds of thousands every year (a horrible statistic), actually
increases in numbers when it’s hunted. Something happens to their breeding. It
may be that when their population is under threat, all of the females in a pack
start to breed, instead of just the alpha female. Or perhaps something hormonal
causes bigger litters. Either way, the efforts of farmers to protect their
lambs seems to make the problem worse. Mothers, fathers, pups are killed for
nothing – except for money: the annual ‘coyote bounty’.

This got me thinking about foxes. Here in a UK, a lot of
people love foxes, but a lot of people hate them. This hatred and distrust has
been coded in tradition (partly through ritualistic and cruel aristocratic
‘sport’) for centuries. They kill our chickens! farmers rage. They raid our
wheelie bins! townies complain. This hatred is pointless, because there’s
nothing to hate; it’s just a focus for people’s frustration, a scapegoating. In
a touching scene in ‘Fantastic Mr Fox’, Mrs Fox (rather sexily voiced by Meryl
Streep) asks her husband, “Why did you lie to me, when you promised you’d never
go raiding the farmer’s birds again?” Mr Fox (a characterful George Clooney)
replies regretfully that he doesn’t know. “I’m a wild animal”, is all he can
say. And of course, that’s right. How can we hate an animal for doing what it
can’t help? Foxes just do what they do. They can’t make a choice to do
something else.

In the British countryside and towns, foxes are the top
predator. They are often called pests by angry homeowners, but they are not
pests. By preying on rats, mice, even insects, they help keep down pest
numbers. They do us a great service. True, they also kill birds, just like our
lovable moggies do. But the RSPB insists that the decline of garden birds has
more to do with our own effects on the ecosystem than with predation by cats
and foxes. As so often, foxes are scapegoated for our own failings.

Going back to the fictional Deanna’s thesis, I wondered if
foxes also breed differently when they’re hunted. Who knows? – it may or may
not be. But when culls have been tried in the past, they’ve always failed.
Killing foxes in towns costs a lot of public money (which surely we can ill afford),
yet despite the killings, foxes maintain a fairly stable population. Numbers
don’t increase, but they stay roughly the same. It seems that foxes from the
countryside or other town areas simply move into spaces left available by
cullings, glad of the opportunities provided. Foxes are a wonderfully adaptable
species, and we punish them for that adaptability, viewing it suspiciously as
cleverness, slyness or cunning. Once again, this is scapegoating; foxes are too
like us humans, the most adaptable mammal species on the planet. And we make
them pay – but for nothing, it seems, than enjoyment, sport or revenge. Yes,
some predators can be wiped out, and
their loss is devastating beyond their extinction as a single species. But
foxes’ numbers remain the same; coyotes’ actually increase. By killing them, we
cause blood and suffering, and the starvation of cubs, all for nothing.

‘Fantastic Mr Fox’ ends with the foxes and other animals, having been
persecuted throughout the film by the farmers, making a new home underneath a
supermarket owned by the same farmers. Adaptable to the end, they have lost
their home in the hill under the beautiful tree, but have made a new life where
they can raid an unlimited supply of food every night. ‘Destroy’ them in one
place, and they pop up in another. Mr Fox is fantastic indeed!

There’s no question whose side the film is on. It celebrates the wit, the
audacity, the adaptability, and the cunning, of the fox. As we should do. And
that goes for the wily coyote as well. We may have to put up with nuisances
from both species, but hating them is just silly, and we need them too.

4 comments:

I love it, Michael. We need more people on the side of the foxes and the wolves. We have such a bad rat problem in my area (being near marshlands and the river) that I'd be quite relieved to have foxes taking care of the problem for us. We have a lot of hunters here too, unfortunately :( and I wish they'd focus on rats instead of other animals.

You're right that the decline in birds is usually human-caused. In Winnipeg, where my better half grew up, many bird species were wiped out by aerial spraying for mosquitoes many years ago, and there are so many horrors going on in Alberta near the tar sands that the waters are becoming toxic. Of course, these things are kept out of the public eye as much as possible.

I am glad you are a spirited voice for the animals, they need our support too. I can't remember the source of the quote, but it says something like you can tell a lot about a people by the way they care for their animal kingdom. Indeed!

Oh, thank you, Jane - that's lovely of you to say. And I agree with everything you say about our damage to the environment. The tar sands are a huge crime against nature, I think. And don't get me started on 'fracking', which threatens to destroy the English countryside too, if the government gets its way.

Thank you for your long comment on my Facebook page, as well. I'll PM you about that, as I can no longer find the post.

Beautiful!! I don't know as much about foxes as I would like to, but I find them compelling and fascinating creatures. Also, in one of those silly online quizzes, I got "fox" as my animal nature. I took the test again, to see what else I would get, and . . . it came out fox again. Maybe I have more kinship with them than I know! ;)

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About Me

2500 years ago, the dying Buddha said, "Be a light unto yourself, be a refuge for yourself. Take yourself to no external refuge." Recently, after years of chronic pain and anxiety, I've been searching for the place inside all of us which Tara Brach calls our 'true refuge' - the aware and compassionate space that lets us know we can handle whatever difficulties life brings. I'm hoping this blog will reflect that search. My interests include photography, nature and wildlife (especially foxes!), reading, music - and travelling, when I'm well enough. Please feel free to comment! All photos are mine unless otherwise credited.